The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(53)

Not today.

I turned in my chair. “You have things to say to me? Say them.”

He licked his lips. “You’re trying to blame this on me,” he said. “Marta told me. She told me everything.”

“Blame what on you, exactly? What are you being blamed for?” All I did was berate people, anymore. I might as well be my ex–best friend. “I don’t see you being threatened with suspension, or anyone pointing their finger at you for a thousand goddamn dollars. So what? Because Elizabeth and I asked questions about who Anna talked to last night, I’m suddenly putting your ass to the fire? I don’t think so.”

Kittredge shook his head. “I didn’t take her money,” he said.

“Her alleged money—”

“Stop saying that,” he interrupted. I had taken this strategy from Holmes, and it rarely failed—people could always be provoked to correct you. “You act like you know what happened, but you don’t. I saw it. She had this fat wad of bills in her pocket, she took it out to show me.”

“She did? Why?”

He looked around carefully, but the library stacks were empty except for us. “Because she said someone gave it to her. She was laughing, like, in disbelief—it’s not like she needed the money, she said. But she was giddy about it. I couldn’t tell if it was the MDMA. I don’t do that shit, so I don’t know.”

“I don’t either.”

“Listen.” He spread his hand on the table, then balled it up. “If I were you, I’d be talking to Beckett Lexington. He sold her those pills. Maybe he was giving her a cash advance on some sales she was going to do for him. He does that, sometimes—Randall was telling me.”

It was a better working theory than anything I had. My estimation of Kittredge went up a notch. “I will,” I said.

Kittredge stood. “We didn’t talk about this. Okay?”

“You don’t want Anna to find out,” I said.

“No.” He eyed me cautiously. “But I also don’t want someone suspended for shit they didn’t do. Beckett works at the school radio station. Start there.”

He stuck out his hand. I clasped it, and just like that we weren’t animals anymore.

“Let’s just get out of Sherringford before it eats us alive,” Kittredge said.

But Beckett Lexington wasn’t easy to find. I checked the radio station, a poky little warren in the basement of Weaver Hall, and found the system on autoplay, records scattered across the floor. The cafeteria wasn’t open for another hour, so I couldn’t corner him at dinner. Finally I looked up his room in the online directory. Apparently he lived on the first floor of my dorm. But I hesitated at the steps up to Michener. Mrs. Dunham would be at the front desk, and she would have heard about my forced leave of absence. I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk being thrown off campus, especially by someone I respected.

My phone buzzed. Your mother’s getting in tonight, my dad had texted. What time do you want me to pick you up?

Can I let you know? I wrote back.

I was standing in the shadows, debating, when Mrs. Dunham came to the door. “It’s freezing,” she said, ushering me in. “Come on, I’ll put the kettle on for you. Isn’t that how you say it? ‘Put the kettle on’?”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

She waved a hand. “I won’t tell the administration if you won’t,” she said, walking back up to her desk. “I’m just icing some cookies I brought from home. Do you want to help?”

There were worse things to do on a stakeout.

I dragged a chair over from the lobby. Mrs. Dunham’s desk was a riot of cheerful uselessness. Her knitting was in a basket, full of the bright scarves she made to send off to her daughter at school, and a series of dala horses she’d brought back from Sweden, red and blue in a line, that she said were for luck. She kept her coffee mug on an ever-rotating stack of poetry books, Mary Oliver and Frank O’Hara and Terrance Hayes, and beside that a tablet that was always streaming something mindless, a buddy cop show or a British baking program. All of her projects could be abandoned at a moment’s notice if she needed to run off to put out some small fire in the dorm.

Today, she had sugar cookies in a giant plastic container, and a number of smaller ones full of red and blue and green frosting. She handed me a knife, then started back up her baking show. I watched the door and tried very hard not to eat every cookie I iced.

Guys came in and out, on their way back from practice or the library or the union, and I steeled myself against the looks I’d get if the news about Anna’s money and my “leave of absence” had spread. But they didn’t. A few said hi, or asked if I was sick, since I hadn’t been in class, and I told them, yes, very sick, not contagious, no, I’ll see you guys next week.

When things were going wrong, it was so easy to imagine that everyone knew, that everyone was talking about it. But nobody cared nearly as much about your life as you did.

We finally came to the bottom layer of cookies just as the 4:30 lull hit, the moment before everyone came down to go to dinner. No sign of Beckett Lexington yet. I looked again at Mrs. Dunham’s desk, but this time my eyes drifted down to the place she kept the master key.

“Something strange happened to me the other day,” I said.